[sdvsr1982]

Does anyone know why this keeps happening & if there's anything i can do to fix it?

[Nigel Goodwin]

A quick google shows this is a VERY common fault, it looks like it's probably a failure of the drive, and would be too expensive to repair.

However, Panasonic have had massive reliability problems with their power supplies (under specified for the job), and that's another possibility - they never even seemed to bother correcting the problem on later machines.

Unfortunately Panasonic are extremely secretive about their DVD recorders, and even normal Panasonic service agents aren't allowed access to service information, only a tiny number of specialised ones.